Hi, everyone-
Wow.
I did not expect so many replies, so quickly. What a friendly community!
Many thanks to all of you.
Most of the private replies I have gotten have pointed me to Festival. I'd
looked at Festival, and I'm pleased with the resulting sound synthesis, but
I cannot seem to find any browser plugin. There are a few references to it,
but none that lead to active links. Does anyone have any information about
this? If neccessary, I might be able to build one myself from the Festival
code, but I'd rather not.
Not to sound ungrateful, but the solution I hoped to find was a browser
plug-in, preferrably C/C++ based (so that it has as few requirements as
possible, which is a bit of a limitation of Java, these days; the excellent
samples I tried were a bit more of a download than I think most users can
bear, and were not as seamless as I think they'd need to be for purposes of
accessibility).
Just to supply as much information as possible, I'm trying to create a
talking calculator (as a simple prototype) to be viewed in a browser. A very
early version is here:
http://www.schepers.cc/testbed/accessibility/SelfDescribingSVG.html
This example uses the Microsoft TTS engine, which is fine, but not
cross-platform. I guess I'd thought that there would be more XML TTS engines
by now, as I'm hoping for a generic solution. Ultimately, I want to create a
much more complex SVG+TTS accessible application, and I want it to be
available for anyone.
An alternate solution that occurs to me is to host a TTS engine on my site,
and stream the sound, but that hardly seems like the best solution.
Again, many thanks!
-Doug